Nigeria security forces kill ‘unarmed civilians’

(This is what is happening in Nigeria, the country where Umar Fizzlepant’s father is one of the wealthiest bankers and is also connected to the national intelligence offices. This is how upstart revolutions are dealt with in the New World Order, this is how they deal with people who are tired of being used as slaves. Imagine what Hillary Clinton and all the war-crazy Neocons would be doing right now if this film came out of Iran. But since Nigeria is already part of the global network of interconnected for-profit central bankers (globalization) this is completely ignored by our MSM.)

Reports of extrajudicial killings by Nigerian security forces circulated widely in the aftermath of clashes last year between the police and members of Boko Haram, a group that called for the enforcement of Islamic law, or sharia, across Nigeria.

Now Al Jazeera has obtained exclusive footage that appears to show Nigerian security forces ordering a number of people to lie in the road and then shooting them at close range.

Human rights groups allege that many of those killed following the clashes were unarmed civilians.

The footage obtained by Al Jazeera would appear to confirm those accusations.

Mike Hanna has this exclusive report.

Warning: The video contains images that may disturb or offend some viewers.

Did You Know? Gaza

Did you know?

Jamiol’s World

The “shock doctrine” for Haiti

by Ashley Smith, Socialist Worker

One month after the devastating earthquake, Haiti continues to suffer under apocalyptic conditions.

The quake killed more than 200,000 people, injured 250,000 and has left over 3 million dependent on assistance for food, water and housing. Contrary to the puff pieces in the media, the relief operation has been a miserable failure. The United Nations admitted at the end of January that had only been able to feed 1 million people, leaving many more without access to food. Whole sections of Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns never even saw relief convoys.

Amid this catastrophe, imperial powers and corporate vultures are circling, eyeing the profits to be made from reconstruction.

The Street, an investment Web site, published an article, misleadingly titled “An Opportunity to Heal Haiti,” that lays out how U.S. corporations can cash in on the catastrophe. “Here are some companies,” they write, “that could potentially benefit: General Electric, Caterpillar, Deere, Fluor, Jacobs Engineering.”

Other commentators–like James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton–likewise see an opportunity to remake Haiti along free market lines. As he wrote in the New York Times, “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms.” As director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation, the reforms he advocates are not designed to meet people’s needs, but to pad corporate profits through mechanisms like privatization.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, Right Mr. President?

by Scott Creighton

You take the helpless and the poor and use them as fodder for corporate gain either in your vast and endless “War on Terror” (call it what you like, but a rose is a rose is a rose) or your 3 year spending freeze or your insurance company bailout plan or your banker bailouts. It’s all the same; make the poor and the working classes pay for the corporations and the bankers gains. 

You do this while evoking the rhetorical pleasantries about human rights and social justice that pop-up on your teleprompter so that your partisan fan-base can sleep at night; the same fan-base that donates time, sweat, and money in shelters and soup kitchens all across the country.

The Blue half of the country that still gives a shit about social equality, justice, and human rights… they see you in them and themselves in you but it’s a lie, isn’t it Barack?  It’s a mirage. They see what they want to see.

It’s a lie because what you do is serve the laissez-faire status-quo of the Washington consensus while your constituents serve soup to the hungry. Each and every one of them, the volunteers and the hungry alike, is a better human being than you will ever be, Mr. President, with or without your Peace Prize prop. I hope your children are priviledged enough Mr. President to be granted a sufficient education to see you for what you really are, sir.

That is my “HOPE”.

So cunning are their lies about you Barack they even enlist the republican branch of your neoliberal swarm to help sell your image; they call you a “socialist” to enrage their desperate supporters while encouraging yours. But it won’t last. This Race To The Top (RTTT) program of yours will eventually expose you to even your most deluded supporters, like all your other Bush continuation agendas have already done for so many of us.

But then again, some of us knew what you were before you were elected; you were just that transparent. You were then as you are now; a servant of fascists, Mr. President, nothing more. Fascists who would target even poor children to get their economic agenda past the collective conscience of the American people (those who still have a conscience, that is).

Make no mistake, you serve fascists, Mr. President; fascists who work to trade the futures of children from poor and working class families, trade away all their hopes and their dreams for a rich full life. They trade away the future of another man’s child  for a privatized buck or two and all the profits they can syphon off the top. These are the kinds of people you serve, Mr. President and the true nature of the legacy you will leave behind.

Palin and the tea-party “movement”: nothing new

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Fox News, April 6, 2006: 

Hundreds of protesters gripped Mexican flags as they marched for immigration reform in the past few weeks, but they say a display of cultural unity is being mistaken as a lack of loyalty to the United States. 

The displays turned off many Americans. Conservative talk show hosts admonished the protesters, while everyday people wrote angry letters to the editors of their local newspapers. 

Some called for those carrying the Mexican flag to return to Mexico. Others questioned why immigrants demanding rights in the United States would wave symbols of Mexico. . . . 

Critics of waving the red, white and green have questioned marchers’ loyalty to the United States, but Latino activists deny the implications. 

 

The Washington Post, yesterday, on Sarah Palin’s Tea Party speech: 

[Palin] had on three opera-length strands of pearls, two white and one multi-colored.  [O]n her lapel, a small pin with two flags — for Israel and the United States. 

 

In its adulating report on Palin’s speech, National Review — whose Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg both bitterly complained about the waving of Mexican flags on U.S. soil — also proudly noted:  ”On her lapel, Palin wore a small pin with two flags — for Israel and the United States.”  Along with the fact that she remains deeply unpopular with most Jewish-American voters, Palin’s flamboyant display of her so-called love for Israel — she previously boasted that the Israeli flag was the “only” one she kept in her Gubernatorial office — is almost certainly grounded in her creepy desire to mold America’s foreign policy to fit her evangelical belief that God demands that “Israeli land” be unified under Israeli control in order for Jesus to return and sweep all the good Christians up to heaven in Rapture (while banishing everyone else — including the Jews she loves so much — straight to hell forever).  That’s one major reason why neocons such as Bill Kristol love her.  Led by Joe Lieberman, neocons have repeatedly shown their willingness to cynically exploit extremist Christian Rapture dogma for greater American fealty towards Israeli actions, and Palin reliably spouts neoconservative dogma on virtually every issue.  Almost every one of her national security pronouncements sounds exactly like Dick Cheney and The Weekly Standard (though her call for expanded Israeli settlements go beyond what even most neocons are willing to advocate openly).   

Is there any other nation in the world where a leading politician can appear in public — without controversy — wearing the flag of a foreign country?  It was a huge scandal on the Right when immigration reform marchers waved Mexican (along with American) flags in order to display cultural solidarity with Mexican immigrants who were being demonized and living in wretched conditions, as non-persons, in the U.S.; isn’t it obviously more significant when someone who recently wanted to be Vice President and is now the leader of this Fox-News-sponsored political movement appears at events in the U.S. wearing an Israeli flag melded to an American flag, as though the two nations are joined as one entity?  Why should an American political leader be wearing an Israeli flag?

Irish eyes aren’t smiling over ambassador’s lavish Rockcliffe digs

by Don Martin, Ottowa Citizen

It takes seriously posh digs to wow the 2,000 residents of Ottawa’s ritzy diplomatic enclave. But construction workers have just finished creating the largest residence in Rockcliffe Park and the neighbourhood is agog at the sprawling mansion financed by a country on the economic skids. When it comes to pampering their ambassador in Canada, nobody beats — surprise — the Irish. Ireland, in an apparently unrelated development, is languishing in a deep recession that’s far worse than other European Union members.

Its government has imposed massive spending cuts and salary rollbacks to try and reduce a crushing debt before the shamrock nation becomes a failed fiscal state.

But prudence was not a consideration in the 15-month gutting of a modest stone house to recreate an abode of unbridled luxury for Irish Ambassador Declan Kelly.

[read the rest of the article, here]

Texas Nurse to Stand Trial for Reporting Doctor

by Kevin Sack, New York Times

It occurred to Anne Mitchell as she was writing the letter that she might lose her job, which is why she chose not to sign it. But it was beyond her conception that she would be indicted and threatened with 10 years in prison for doing what she knew a nurse must: inform state regulators that a doctor at her rural hospital was practicing bad medicine.

When she was fingerprinted and photographed at the jail here last June, it felt as if she had entered a parallel universe, albeit one situated in this barren scrap of West Texas oil patch.

… When the medical board notified Dr. Arafiles of the anonymous complaint, he protested to his friend, the Winkler County sheriff, that he was being harassed. The sheriff, an admiring patient who credits the doctor with saving him after a heart attack, obtained a search warrant to seize the two nurses’ work computers and found the letter.

… Mari E. Robinson, executive director of the Texas Medical Board, has warned in a blistering letter to prosecutors that the case will have “a significant chilling effect” on the reporting of malpractice.

The nurses’ lawyers, John H. Cook IV and Brian Carney, have filed a civil lawsuit in federal court charging the county, hospital, sheriff, doctor and prosecutor with vindictive prosecution and denial of the nurses’ First Amendment rights

[read the rest, here]

A World of Gordon Gekkos

“Greed, you mark my words, will save that other malfuctioning corporation, the USA.”

Secret summit of top bankers

THE world’s top central bankers began arriving in Australia yesterday as renewed fears about the strength of the global economic recovery gripped world share markets.

Representatives from 24 central banks and monetary authorities including the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank landed in Sydney to meet tomorrow at a secret location, the Herald Sun reports.

Organised by the Bank for International Settlements last year, the two-day talks are shrouded in secrecy with high-level security believed to have been invoked by law enforcement agencies. Harold Sun

CIA Death Squads are Alive and Well In Todays Drone Industry

by Scott Creighton

CIAs For-Profit Death Squad - Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You

There was a time in this country when death-squads were taboo, unspoken, illegal activities desperately hidden from public view for fear that they would so outrage the American conscience as to incite riots and protests in the streets …now they are a celebrated and over-funded for-profit enterprise of which the director of the CIA feels completely comfortable bragging about in congress of all places.

In the past, the primary weapon of the CIA backed death-squad was a American made M-16 or the heel of a Seal Team member’s boot (at least it was so in Vietnam during Operation Phoenix, which killed over 26,000 Vietnamese civilians) today we have the Drone; an unmanned aerial missile launching platform designed and created by NASA (on your tax dime… and lots of them) and then handed over to companies like General Atomics so they can make a pretty penny manufacturing them for the defense department and other repressive governments all over the world. You pay for the research and testing and you pay for the drone while NASA friendly corporations make off with the profits. Not a bad gig when you can get it.

The Secret Government Bill Moyers 1987

I guess he didn’t know about Operation Northwoods at the time and he didn’t mention Kennedy’s decision to dismantle the CIA or his firing of Dulles… Moyers was also vague about the Gulf on Tonkin incident (because he was working for Johnson at the time?) but overall it’s a good video clip detailing the rise of the CIA, the most dangerously anti-democratic institution in the world.

There is a very good article you should read over at the The Existentialist Cowboy.